Inspired 1970s horror films and 1990s indie films, the episode focuses on the history of American Indian boarding schools. "Deer Lady" also makes use of the endangered Kiowa language. The production team consulted multiple subject matter experts to ensure the topic was accurate represented. Post-production staff faced challenges in perfecting the audio as well as editing and scoring it. It was first released on FX on Hulu on August 9, 2023. The episode received positive reviews from critics and was nominated for a Creative Arts Emmy Award.
Plot
Deer Lady stops at a diner. Bear arrives at the diner, still penniless and lost, but polite to everyone even though they do not help him. Deer Lady observes him for a while and then invites him to sit with her. She shares her food with him and offers him a ride back to Oklahoma. When he realizes who she is, he is frightened, but does not run. Through flashbacks, we learn that when this incarnation of Deer Lady was still human, she was a child at a very abusive American Indian boarding school, St. Nicholas Training School, where she witnessed her friends being beaten and killed. One night she escaped and fled for her life. She was saved in the woods by an otherworldly deer, became the Deer Lady, and exacts vengeance on abusers. Bear goes with her and waits in the truck while she goes to the home of the abusive man who ran the boarding school to kill him. Bear is worried but ultimately approves of her seeking justice for herself and the other children of the school. Together they drive back to Okern, and Bear returns home.
"Deer Lady" was written by showrunner and co-creator Sterlin Harjo and directed by Danis Goulet.[1][2] Harjo wrote the episode as a split script, that alternates its scenes between the present-day and flashbacks. The episode explores the origin story of its titular character, Deer Lady, and the events that lead to her becoming a spirit and her justifications for murder.[3] Deer Lady is a Native American myth known for her associations to love and fertility but sometimes becomes "murderous and vengeful"; within the series she is portrayed by Kaniehtiio Horn.[4]
Flashback scenes take the form of a period drama with an educational tone, the latter of which is unusual for the series. It tells the story of Native American Assimilation at American Indian boarding schools.[5][6] Harjo said he felt an obligation to "tell some truths" and wanted to "represent that experience" by "show[ing] people what the reality was."[5] To properly tell the story, Harjo decided that nuns at the school, who spoke English, should sound like gibberish to the viewers, in the same way that real children in these situations would understand them. This aspect was inspired by Charlie Brown's teacher from the Peanuts franchise whose voice was made to sound like a trombone.[5][7] Themes of historical trauma are present in the episode.[8] No other member of the main cast appears in the episode outside of D'Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai.[9]
The episode is one of two that Goulet directed for the season, along with the season premiere, "Bussin".[10] She and Harjo took inspiration from horror films of the 1970s when producing scenes set at the boarding school. Goulet stated she wanted to specifically use this era because of the way "intense realism" and "something fantastical" was mixed. She also named the 2018 reboot of Suspiria as an influence.[5] Meanwhile, the current day scenes in the diner use elements similar to indie films from the 1990s.[11] Denise Lajimodiere, the author of Stringing Rosaries, a book about American Indian boarding schools, was also on set to ensure authentic representation in the flashback scenes.[3]
Scenes at the school make use of Kiowa, an endangered language of which only 20 native speakers remain.[5] Warren C. Queton, a language consultant, was hired to assist young performers with their pronunciation.[3] Queton held Zoom meetings with the actors for lessons before filming began.[12]Spiritual leaders and parents were also on set while these scenes were filmed to help the children feel more comfortable. Georgeanne Growingthunder was cast in the role of young Deer Lady; she is of Kiowa ancestry and was already in the process learning the language. Michael Podemski-Bedard, who portrays Koda, is the son of Jennifer Podemski, who recurs in the show as Dana.[5]
Another scene at the school included a Native American child getting their hair cut. Goulet said that Native American beliefs on hair caused the production team to spend "weeks" deciding whether to use a wig or to actually cut someone's hair. Goulet received input from multiple people, including director Tasha Hubbard. They ultimately decided to cut the hair when they located an actor who was already planning on having their hair cut.[11]
Near the end of the episode, Goulet initially intended to zoom in while Deer Lady committed the murder, she later decided to use a close-up technique instead as she felt it captured the emotion better.[5] At the conclusion of the scene, Deer Lady exits the house and walks away; Director of Photography Mark Schwartzbard used a steadicam to film this scene which he called "heavy but graceful".[8] Horn said that she used memories from her own history to improve her acting in the episode, specifically recalling how her older sister, Waneek Horn-Miller, was bayoneted while holding her during the Oka Crisis in 1990.[13]
Mato Wayuhi, the composer, and Patrick Hogan, the sound supervisor, were tasked with achieving the intended sound effect for the nuns' gibberish. Hogan said that Goulet filmed takes where the nuns were both speaking English normally and speaking gibberish themselves. However, the latter takes were unusable as it sounded like a "German–Dutch" hybrid. The post-production team asked the actresses who portrayed the nuns to return so that they could attempt automated dialogue replacement (ADR), where the words within their sentences would be mixed up instead. Hogan stated that this attempt made them sound too close to Yoda.[14]
Hogan then teamed up with David Beadle, the dialogue editor, who determined they needed to manipulate the audio quality. They used a lower pitch for their voices which made "nonsense ad-libs and mismatched English sound as booming as a dragon's bellow." The voices were then reversed to complete the effect. In one of the final scenes, young Deer Lady comes across a deer spirit in the forest, which speaks to her. A similar technique was employed for the deer's dialogue, which was recorded in the Kiowa language and voiced by Aykeemah, one of the remaining native speakers. Wayuhi provided a score for this scene and the dialogue was fit to this score to make it sound more lyrical. Wayuhi described the final musical cue as a "challenge to find a median between hopefulness and hopelessness."[14]
Goulet said that Varun Viswanath, the episode's editor, stated he was "very emotional" during the process and that it was "going slower than normal."[3] Viswanath also called it "the most challenging thing to work on" and said that there were probably "40 different compelling cuts of this episode in our Avid projects." After Viswanath and Goulet were satisfied with the director's cut, the episode was passed on to Harjo, and another editor, Patrick Tuck, who made the final cut.[15]
Featured music in the episode included two songs from Mali Obomsawin, "Fractions" and "Lineage", two from Durwood Daily Haddock, "How Lonesome Can I Get" and "Start All Over", as well as "Memory Bound" by Don Mcginnis.[16] A viewer discretion notice was added at the suggestion of Horn.[13][17]
Release and reception
"Deer Lady" was released on Hulu on August 9, 2023, under their FX on Hulu content banner.[1] Reviewing the episode for IndieWire, Proma Khosla called it "one of the show's best and most powerful yet, honing in on the trauma and folklore behind one character".[18] The A.V. Club's Manuel Bentacourt wrote that the episode was a "transcendent half hour of television" and explained that he appreciated learning Deer Lady's origin rather than the series just using folklore to explain it.[19] Hannah Giorgis with The Atlantic, stated that it had a "viscerally unnerving style".[20] Alan Sepinwall from Rolling Stone opined that the gibberish the nuns spoke was a "smart stylistic choice" and that it sounded like it had "been placed into a food processor, chopped up and reassembled at random, and then run through a few audio filters." Sepinwall later said, "there's a cost to being a person, but there's also a cost to being a Deer Lady, and this episode beautifully captures that cost."[21]Vulture critic Kali Simmons compared the nuns gibberish to that the spirits in Black Lodge speak in the horror television series Twin Peaks.[22]
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